Author: Joy Kundig

Nobody ever actually tells you that you’re going to be flying into one of the world’s most dangerous airports. However, if your local low-cost carrier sells you a ticket for a seven-hour round trip out of Geneva for 43.50 francs, be prepared for anything.

It started, as all good things do, with an idea—that old post-Christmas, chase-away-the-blues, ocean ozone week away. And, of course, it was not our fault that the flight to Funchal, Madeira—a rugged Atlantic island featuring fado, sword fish, water mills, poncha, irrigation canals, landslides, and viewpoints—was so surprisingly cheap. So many kilometres for so little money. What a deal!

On our departure day we ended up (after six hours in the air) back on the Portuguese mainland in Porto. We even got a 7-euro supper coupon, and our flight was re-scheduled for the following morning.

Oh yes. We should have been in Madeira, but having flown out to the island, and examined the seething cauldron of rain and cloud and tempestuous winds below, the pilot chirpily informed us that we were not allowed to land.

Day Two meant getting up at 4 a.m. (again) but this time, we managed to successfully touch down at the little Funchal Airport. This was accompanied with much cheering and clapping–pilot and crew included.

The airport runway extends out over top of the motorway at the edge of the sea. It actually tilts up a bit at the end which I guess is a serious clue to the pilot as to which way he should be heading. It is more or less like landing on an air-craft carrier, except that there is no elastic bungee to catch your wheels and stop you going over the edge and into the drink.

There is no flatness in Madeira (except in the middle where the wind turbines are all continuously blasting at full-speed and no one in their right mind would ever want to land there). Plus, Madeira is a volcano and seriously close to the earth’s core (information gathered from the Lava Tunnels Volcanic Visitor’s Centre) so dramatic danger can be just around the corner at any place or time.

Our big fight with the lying and cheating car rental company is now fading into oblivion. Our walks in the laurel forests with the view of the wine-dark sea far below are anchored firmly in our memories. The poncha and passion fruit drink at the warm and sunny harbour is recalled with longing. The flour from the old mill has been baked into bread.

We even got our full week’s holiday, as our departure was delayed for 30 hours due to the windy rainy airport being closed yet again.

A winter trip to an Atlantic island can, eventually, be crowned with success. Money is not so important: just take lots of time with you.

We do not really have smoothies here in the Geneva countryside. We have yogurt and we have compost bins. We have juice extractors, lemon presses, and blenders. We also have neat and efficient Nespresso coffee machines and George Clooney’s face on airport walls. What else could we possibly need?

Suddenly, though, the smoothie bullet machine has become ubiquitous. In the January post-foie-gras struggle to regain levity and youth, the stores are heaped high with these never-before-seen, health-war, bomb-shaped machines. The clear plastic globe carries the charge and is shown stuffed with a mixture of fresh fruit and vegetables—plump, perfect, and pristine—all ready to be whizzed into your daily dose of wellbeing.

You add exotics such as barberries, Goji berries, chia seeds, wheat germ, hemp, linen, almonds, dates and cranberries. To smooth it out, you add an avocado and/or a banana. Apparently, removing the peel is optional.

The cutting/slicing/dangerous blades tear up the outer structures of the seeds and nuts and release their essential nutrients that would otherwise just slide right through you. You are warned not to include avocado or apricot stones to your mixture. You are rejuvenated as you suck down the pap.

You no longer need teeth.

As our cuisine dissolves, so do our minds. In my village in the Geneva countryside, there is no cable TV. Until recently, we relied on an antenna on the roof and a receiver dish, wobbling in the wind, strapped to the chimney, pointing toward a possible satellite. However, a recent automatic upgrade on our telephone system means that Netflix has raised its head of seductive nothingness.

Inside this smooth advertisement-free world, you suck down mindless made-for-TV-series of brilliant non-qualified lawyers, zombies, fictionalized royal history, movie-star sex-criminals who suddenly disappear, and future princesses. We sit under quilts and approach death at an alarming rate.

You no longer need thought.

To counter this mushy decadence and inspired by a recent Venice visit to a cold church filled with Leonardo’s incomprehensible machines, I have blown off the dust and taken up volume one (out of three) of The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. This attempt to claw myself back into the world of gravitas has definitely not worked as the 500-year old observations are startlingly relevant and depressing as he worries about overpopulation, pandemics, climate disasters, political wandering wits, and the importance of truth.

Seriously stuck in the slough of despond, I have not moved past page 102 and the tome is now being used as a pillow for the Chi energy machine which is gathering dust under the couch.

I like to think that if Leonardo were around today, he would be busy building a rocket to Mars to save mankind. But, perhaps, he would have given up like the rest of us, and wearing a pair of pink pyjamas, be cuddled up to his boyfriend, mindlessly sucking on a millet and strawberry smoothie while watching Da Vinci’s Demons.

The Canton of Geneva is a source of constant hilarity to the other 25 cantons of the Swiss Confederation. Various local politicians go out on shaky limbs, plan unending projects, pull repetitive bloopers. These absurdities (Genevoiserie in French and genferei in German) are well-documented and there is an official web-site (http://www.genferei.org/) that is guaranteed to make you laugh out loud in these cold wet windy January days.

Some of the simpler genfereis include planning to build apartment buildings inside highway cloverleaves, planting the wrong (not growing) sort of (expensive) grass in the football stadium, hiring artists to paint designs under the trams at the tram stops, or modernizing the public transport system so that no one can figure out how to get to where they used to go.

Creativity, foresightedness and complexity are essential ingredients in a jolly good genferei, as is spending lots and lots of money. The joke is even bigger if the federal government has been persuaded to join in.

To my knowledge, no one is ever really punished for a genferei; rather, there is an annual prize for the very best one. In extreme and conflicting cases there could be a bit of finger-wagging, but as no one did anything bad on purpose, then these follies are written off as simply being part of the great human comedy of life.

Now, last night’s national news (perhaps to become redundant as we are all voting in a few weeks about abandoning the federal TV and radio tax but that’s another story) had a small report that Geneva is currently forming its very own Mounted Police force. Nine police people are currently in Belgium on a week-long training course.

The news presenter’s smirk was a dead give-away: the story has the makings of a perfect genferei.

Coming from Canada, the idea of tall strong men on horses bounces off my spirit and images of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police rise up: the red jackets, the flat-brimmed hats, the stiff upper lip, the impeccable black horses, the Musical Ride, Dudley Do-Right.

Of course, the Canadian Mounties no longer use horses operationally and from what I have seen a horse’s role in law enforcement in the 21st century has to do with urban patrolling and crowd control. Getting blown on by a big, smelly, uncouth horse would make just about anyone drop whatever they were doing and go home.

But no. Geneva’s Mounties are predestined to patrol rural and suburban zones. They will saunter bucolic bridle paths and gallop the frontiers. They will drink coffee at the garage up the hill. They will enforce finicky dog-poo laws and check on candy-wrapper litter.

They will be regularly sent on international training courses to acquire more equestrian skills. They will eat sparingly, I’m sure. Just a sprinkle of federal funding (transportation, perhaps?) and a most beautiful genferei is in the makings.

Well, it wasn’t really my fault that I read the book. It was just an experiment.

My Kindle is my very favourite object. It is literally the only gadget that I have ever truly coveted and ordered for myself. A colleague, stuck in hospital for a spell, actually let me hold hers and “turn” the pages some years back and I was captivated.

So the day before yesterday, I just had a peekto see if I could buy the famous sold-out book by the journalist, Michael Wolff. It was available, so I made a snap intellectual decision to read it as quickly as possible before it could be withdrawn and disappear into the ether (this has happened to me before.)

I am ordinarily not a chaser of ambulances and dislike political exposés, but this one struck me as important considering the size-of-the-button situation. A child growing up in Canada during the Cuban Missile Crisis, having nightmares about having to hide in the village culvert not to be blown up, I am oddly scared to death of nuclear bombs.

Anyway, I now possess the complete mental low-down on the White House (and I am not talking about the Shell garage up the hill.) I know everything about D.C.

To those of us who have been following, unbelieving and mesmerized, the goings on of the American political scene over the past year, there is little that is startling or new. So, if you are not a committed reader, you would die of boredom quite soon. The names of the ex-staffers and presidential “friends” just go on and on.

There is very little juicy material (except a couple of cheeseburgers) to get your teeth into. As a teacher, I was saddened to learn that Donald does not know how to read which is why he has three tv screens in his (separate) bedroom.

Another interesting snippet is that Donald is frightened of being poisoned, and so, like a Roman emperor, has a cheeseburger taster—or, preferentially, orders take-out from McDonalds.

Then there’s the fact that for Donald, the White House is a definite accommodation downgrade. His luxury triplex in Trump Towers in New York, makes the Washington presidential mansion seem like a shack in the woods. The perks of bowling alley, cinema, and plane are not interesting or overwhelming (as they would be almost any other person) as he already has any of this stuff he wants.

But what really caught my fancy is that even his height is fake. He has added inches to himself to squeeze in beneath the “obese” scale of the BMI. He claims to be something like 8 feet tall.

Of course, all the routine stuff about the FBI, the Russians, young women, the concept of Trumpism, the definition of an idiot, the Kushners, Bannon, the generals, money laundering, fluffs out the story and gives it a bit of a political slant.

In those old hectic days of work, deadlines, and worry when the hours in a day were just too few to deal properly with shoddy merchandise, you might have been forgiven for tipping that bottle of sour wine down the sink or throwing away some freshly-bought completely-rotten product.

However, one of the many advantages of being part of the post-work-for-money world, is that justice can, finally, be served. We—the retired ones with our marbles still in place and our glasses sparkling clean—are the new commercial warriors out there making the shops a safer and a better place for you.

For example, there was yesterday evening’s incident concerning the duck terrine in the metal-clip glass jar. Served as a festive treat, those salt crystals turned out to be bits of glass. Experience helps here. Having broken a tooth on sandy leeks stuffed into a Brittany crèpe a few years back, I recognized the sound and texture of imminent danger and raised the alarm at the supper table.

Once you have a culprit, it is important to return the faulty product as soon as possible. If not, you could easily forget all about it, destroy evidence, or present a mumbling, half-remembered, unbelievable account of the incident.

If your story is fresh, (much like the duck fat in which the glass shards are still embedded) you do not even need a receipt. The lady gives you money and expresses her sincere hope and belief that such an incident is a freak of nature and will never happen again.

She then calls the manager.

I have returned many horrible things. There was the rotten chicken where I found myself in a Monday-morning line-up with other elderly innocents who had been expecting a roast fowl for their Sunday dinner. The stench was overwhelming and the customer services personnel could not process us fast enough.

Then there was the incident of the fat white worm in the can of corn. There the serviceaprès-vente lady made the mistake of asking me whether I had placed the worm there as some sort of prank.

Exchanging a bottle of bad wine is never a problem in a supermarket, but at my local farmer’s barn I once took back a very nasty bottle. Wine snobbery is little tolerated here in the far west, I was told not to return anything ever again. Real men drink corked wine out here in the Geneva countryside.

My perfect return was a thick piece of chocolate with a hair sticking right through it. I ate all around the offensive bit, and actually sent the nibbled disc to the address on back of the chocolate wrapping. A few weeks later I received a carton of chocolate bars in the mail along with a personal letter explaining how a hygienic bristle from a nut-sweeping brush had got itself stuck and they were ever so sorry.

If you are not extremely careful, these grey, cloudy, short Geneva days can chip away at even the chirpiest of Christmas spirts. So, once your tree is up, your presents wrapped, your cards and parcels sent, the fridge stuffed to exploding with food and drink here are some extra mood-enhancing activities to consider.

When invited out to group luncheon events, always remember to choose from the more expensive end of the menu. In the final tally and division, no one is going to remember that you had the green salad and the single Malakoff (deep fried cheese ball) with tap water while everyone else ate suprème de pintade fumée avec foie gras, the risotto aux langoustines, had cheese AND dessert, and drank several bottles of a cracking ‘89 Chassagne Montrachet.

If you’re feeling any domestic culinary pressure (either real or imagined) bake a batch or two of the easiest of all festive cookies – the coconut macaroon. Whipped egg white, sugar and desiccated coconut decorated with a perky candied cherry fulfils the cookie-imperative nicely. They are fat-free, cholesterol-free, and might even be vegan and gluten-free depending on where the egg whites have come from. Store them in sealed tins and smugly serve when appropriate.

Congratulate yourself for not having been a control-freak fall-tidy-up gardener and consider the brown, straggly, and wizened plants outside your windows. After careful study, you will notice that small friendly birds are picking at their miniscule seeds. Normal-sized seeds from the commercial suet-and-seed bird balls would undoubtedly choke these little golf-ball-sized-birds to death. Consider yourself as a St. Francis /Mother Theresa hybrid.

Before the big day (evening of the 24th/Swiss, morning of the 25th/ Canadian) vacuum under the couch. You will find several nasty things, but also lost objects that can be turned into thoughtful Christmas gifts. Why, just this morning I have found a brand new blue toy pick-up truck unknowingly lost since last Christmas, and a watch that I have been looking for for years.

Try to drag yourself away from your various entertainment and information screens at least once. Go to a book shop and browse the shelves. Take along an elusive title and feel thrilled if you find it, and justified in your Kindle Life if you don’t.

Examine and reorganize your mouse-catching activities. For example, oil your mouse-trapsand renew your jar of peanut butter. I see that the jar that I have been (unsuccessfully) using has a best-before date of 2009 which might account for the rather rancid smell that is obviously NOT attracting either the mouse in the kitchen or its new colleague in the basement. Have a serious talk with the cat.

When all of the above fail to deliver, then it is time to either head for the hills, the snow and the sunshine. Or, close the drapes and settle down with the macaroon tin and a new Netflix series.

Well, Christmas is always a fraught time in this house. In the good old days (Geneva in the 1970s and 1980s) Christmas glitter only came to the shops and the streets after The Escalade (Geneva beating off the Savoyards with the main weapon being an iron soup pot) had been properly celebrated in mid-December.

The dark historical parade with horses, fife and drum bands, and musket marksmen marching through the sombre streets, soon, though, was overtaken by twinkle lights and tat and lost itsmysterious ability to transport us all back to a scary, frosty, noisy night in 1602.

Then, for many decades, we travelled abroad specifically (pay more get less!) during the festive season in order to avoid its commercial hysteria. This ended some years back with our hotel entrance in Cochin being blocked by a larger-than-life, menacingly moustachioed, blow-up Santa. We kept plugging away, but who needs the psychological trauma of Feliz Navidad ringing in your ears to this day from playing on a continuous loop on a 5-hour flight?

Christmas had won. We bowed out and retreated to the mountains with barely a Bah! or a Humbug!

However, in these days of grandparenthood, it seems churlish not to offer childish cultural entertainment to the little ‘uns and a traditional Christmas has been somewhat revived.

The tree was bought over the border in France and brought in last week (too late for a Canadian and too early for a Swiss) and decorated with lights (Canadian) not candles (Swiss). Glass ornaments (old ones from Czechoslovakia and new ones from China) have been hung. Chocolate figures (purely Swiss) have been tied onto all protruding tips.

The two-year-old who seems to have been running the place around here the last couple of days has definitively proved the second law of thermodynamics: entropy (movement and mess) is constantly increasing.

Chocolate, of course, has been a major inspiration and a solid source of energy in this. The pre-breakfast (6 a.m.) chocolate mouse (used as a bribe to get him to bed the night before) was a huge disappointment as it proved to have an unpleasant (marzipan) filling, and had to be compensated for with a solid chocolate Père Noel.

At this point, breakfast itself was redundant; however, a parking house was needed for the red car and the green tractor. Grandma cleverly thought of the stable of the old family-made Nativity Scene and proudly produced this from the bomb shelter and unwrapped all the hand-made figurines to reveal the True Meaning of Christmas.

The red car and the green tractor were parked and forgotten in the stable. Brittle oxen and asses quickly lost their legs and had to be repaired with bandages. Mother Mary was parachuted into a Strumpf/Smurf house to visit a while with Strumpfette.

And a carefully swaddled baby Jesus was last seen riding in the elephant wagon on a lego circus train.

Tour groups make me sick. There you are, finally arrived at your hotel, sitting quietly contemplating your murky welcome drink and recovering from one malady or another, when a remarkably-healthy loudly-shouting gang suddenly shows up and takes over the whole joint. Elevator, swimming pool, corridors and restaurant are suddenly rocking with the tour.

I recall a noisy and gaseous time in Morocco when a covey of grey-haired Frenchmen wearing ascots roared in with old cars with numbers on their sides. Then there was the loud bunch on New Year’s Eve in Aswan that called the waiter over and told him to go to the kitchen tell the cook that the food wasn’t good.

And just recently, in Burma/Myanmar not only were there countless tour groups about, but even the Pope was there running with a gang.

In an attempt to avoid these heaving organic masses, a smaller more discreet hotel can be the answer for the discriminating traveller: the boutique hotel.

Boutique hotels have very few, very expensive, rooms. They revel in mindfulness and existential peace. Their philosophy is that less is better.

For example, there is no TV in a true boutique hotel room: one is not to be shaken by political events or stirred by strenuous movies. There is not even a TV in the lobby, as there is no lobby—just a few atmospheric candles.

There is no mini-bar or fridge in a boutique hotel. Clanking motors are anathema to essential peace and inner tranquillity and chosing a beverage can be a strenuous effort. Extremes are erased. Your complimentary bottle of drinking water is served at room-temperature.

Lighting is very discreet. In fact, it is a bit like being back in the womb, so you will not be disturbed by brightness or glare. You walk into walls, doors and bed rims. You will not, though, walk into cupboards, shelves, drawers or pictures as there are none.

Bathrooms are at the heart of a boutique hotel experience. There is a massive rain head shower and green plants growing all around. Toilet paper is to be found hidden in a lidded hand-woven basket. Oils and creams are displayed in hand-thrown clay pots. There are no towels as they have been origamied into swans and are reposing on the bed. Soap is handmade and wrapped in newspaper and tied with a piece of hemp. There are flower petals on top and a smooth stone underneath. The bath-mat is folded into a peace sign.

The mosquito net above the bed is artfully arranged into a sort of lotus shape high in the middle of the cathedral-ceilinged room. You are told not to touch it. There is a spare room without a roof, but containing two wooden chairs. A back-to-nature room, perhaps.

Breakfast is unabashedly vegan. The closest thing to a bit of bacon is a blueberry. You are served calmly and serenely. In the smooth quiet, no one has to tell the cook that it isn’t good.

It is never our fault when our rental car gets damaged. Often it has to do with the indigenous population who, through sheer ignorance, lack of education and cultural isolation, do not speak our language. Plus, they are often driving on the wrong side of the road.

The shocking local terrain is also to blame. Inviting dotted lines on maps should really be closed to normal traffic, and the little plastic tapes attached to flimsy poles to discourage road use should be replaced with something more substantial.

Years back, driving a rental over the Beartooth Mountain Pass into Yellowstone Park the tearing and scraping noises coming from underneath the car as we rode through the potholes were most disheartening.

Then there was the afternoon on a short-cut down from the top of a beautiful mountain lookout in Corfu. The road was simply too narrow and the razor-sharp gorse bushes scratched and etched huge cuts into rental’s originally glittering paintwork. We passed the burned out shell of a car (a rental?) about half way down.

And I will only talk about the Hokkaido disaster with the utmost reluctance…

In Japan, they refuse to rent their rentals to foreigners. They are entirely right. However, a morning’s perseverance in Otaru got us a miniscule little car about the same size and with the same technical skills as a Japanese Toto Washlet toilet.

We squeezed ourselves in and with the engine making a high-pitched buzzing noise, drove a couple of hours to a tourist site where the earth’s crust was about half-an-inch thick. There were crooked buildings, broken roads, and bridges going nowhere. Fumaroles were going off left and right. Your shoes got hot and started melting. It was all very exhilarating.

We were so excited that we almost missed the turn off, and, pulling a sharp left, touched the curb. The tire, which was about the size and strength of an aluminium disposable pie plate, exploded.

There was a saucer-sized spare wheel, but no jack. As I was making my way back across a field with a rock to place under the car a nice man slowed down and offered us his “Jakko”. Blood, sweat, tears, and a visit to Doctor Drive got us out of that particularly hot and sticky situation.

Recently, rental companies are getting both smart and lazy. Why waste a perfectly good tire as a spare? In our last rental in Rhodes a couple of weeks back, there was just a can of foam goop to squirt into your flat tire (which we did).

And Canada has taken things to an entirely ethereal level. While adjusting the rear-view mirror in a Chevy rental in September, a miniscule red button inadvertently got pushed. Five minutes later, a disembodied voice invited us to share our problem. I instinctively played dead, but my sister gamely piped up and informed the air inside the car that we were all just fine.

Well, at the local supermarket in France two days ago, there was no butter on the butter shelf. I even checked twice, as I could not make my brain believe in the big black butter hole.

Figuring that the delivery truck had had an accident (it HAS been unseasonably warm lately up in the mountains) we were reduced to buying the very last package—a thin sliver of salty (loser) butter.

Fortunately, we always travel with a brick of Swiss cooking butter in the trusty blue Cool Box, so made it through supper to the news where we were officially (French government TV) enlightened as to the butter crisis: It was explained that a new scientific paper had just been published and butter was being extolled as the latest health food. Cholesterol was suddenly GOOD for you! The French population had gone wild, and butter was flying off the shelves!

Now, our friends and neighbours in the Haute Savoy are no wimps. Their idea of a jolly good holiday is going bear hunting in Canada. Their summertime dream job is logging an entire mountainside and installing a new ski lift. Who had known that they had been so petrified of butter?

We happily settled down to digest this latest food fad and vowed to eat as much butter as possible before it was suddenly bad for us again.

Yesterday, though, there came a sad piece of breaking news on the butter front. The family arrived and they, too, had had a supermarket butter shock. Their Swiss-based research had led to the political/economic explanation that industrial butter had suddenly risen in price, and supermarket butter was now cheaper, and so every baker and cake-maker in France was now super-market shopping for the raw products for their buttery treats.

Every morning, they sweep the supermarket shelves empty at 8 a.m., and after that, there is nothing left for the rest of us except the occasional tub of omega-rich fish-oil spread.

Both stories were augmented by the fact that France now depends entirely upon its local dairy production and the great international butter mountains of old have been melted by zillions of Chinese people who now want butter to put on their bread as they are no longer happy with their little iron bowls of boiled rice.

It certainly is true that there used to be cartons and cartons of very cheap and good New Zealand and Australian butter piled up in the supermarkets underselling the more exotic French regional butter brands.

Back at the shop this morning, and there was a new development. A typed sign flapping forlornly in front of the butter hole explained that there was a national butter shortage.

It did not explain the problem, but at least had the grace not to blame the scientists, the bakers or the Chinese.

Posts navigation

A PROPOS de ce blog

Joy Kündig-Manning was born in England, and grew up in Canada. Specialist in 18th-century English literature (Universities of Toronto, Warwick and Geneva) she has worked as a translator, teacher and writer. She is married to a Swiss, has been a resident of Geneva since 1977.
Joy Kündig-Manning est née en Angleterre et a vécu au Canada. Spécialisée dans la littérature anglaise du XVIIIe siècle, elle a travaillé comme traductrice, enseignante, et écrivaine. Mariée à un Suisse, elle est venue à Genève en 1977.